May 26-28, 2015 / Scottsdale, Arizona

The third annual conference on the Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Ethics, was held at the Scottsdale Resort & Conference Center, in Scottsdale, Arizona, on May 26-28, 2015.

The conference consisted of plenary and session presentations with discussions on regulatory, governance, legal, policy, social and ethical aspects of emerging technologies, including (but not limited to) nanotechnology, synthetic biology, biotechnology, genomics, personalized medicine, stem cell and regenerative medicine, human enhancement technologies, telecommunications, information technologies, surveillance technologies, geoengineering, neuroscience and robotics. The conference is premised on the belief that there is much to be learned and shared from and across the governance experience and proposals for these various emerging technologies.

Keynote Speakers:

Jonathan D. Moreno is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine.

Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and is a National Associate of the National Research Council. He has served as a senior staff member for three presidential advisory commissions, including the current bioethics commission under President Obama, and has given invited testimony for both houses of congress. Nominated by the U.S. government, Moreno is a member of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee. He was an Andrew W. Mellon post doctoral fellow, holds an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University, and is a recipient of the Benjamin Rush Medal from the College of William and Mary Law School and the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University. In 2014 he was given a three-year term as Visiting Professor in History at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

Mustafa Suleyman was co-founder & Chief Product Officer of DeepMind Technologies, a leading AI company backed by Founders Fund, Li Ka-Shing, Elon Musk, and David Bonderman amongst others, which was bought by Google in 2014 in their largest European acquisition to date. He is now Head of Applied AI at Google DeepMind, responsible for integrating the company’s technology across a wide range of Google products. At 19 he dropped out of Oxford University to help set up a telephone counselling service, building it to become one of the largest mental health support services of its kind in the UK. He then worked as a policy officer for the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. Mustafa went on to help start Reos Partners, a boutique consultancy with eight offices across four continents specializing in designing and facilitating large scale multi-stakeholder ‘Change-Labs’ aimed at navigating complex problems. As a skilled negotiator and facilitator Mustafa has worked all over the world for a wide range of clients such as The UN, The Dutch Government and WWF.

Doug Wolens,Producer, Director, Editor

Within the coming decades we’ll have the ability to create computers with greater than human intelligence, bio-engineer our species and redesign matter through nanotechnology, what will it mean to be human? Acclaimed as “a large-scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter-futurist ideas” and “the best documentary on the Singularity to date,” THE SINGULARITY is rich with insight, while remaining accessible to mainstream audiences. Some of the world’s leading thinkers, futurists and counter-futurists are interviewed, including Ray Kurzweil, Leon Panetta, Bill McKibben and Richard A. Clarke. THE SINGULARITY is an engaging tool for critical thinking about future technologies.

Plenary Sessions:

Free Speech, Privacy & Technology

Inter-Generational Equity and Emerging Technologies

Technological Unemployment: Governance Implications

Politicization of Science and the Governance of Emerging Technologies

Emerging Technologies and Security: Just War Theories and Emerging Technologies